She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift.
BILLY WILDERI don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
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One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
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We’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.
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I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it’s getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous.
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Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.
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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
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They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
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I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don’t bury our dead. When you think it’s out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.
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France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
BILLY WILDER -
[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
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God save me from myself.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window – that is at once interesting.
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If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
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Ah, Marilyn, Hollywood’s Joan of Arc, our Ultimate Sacrificial Lamb. Well, let me tell you, she was mean, terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever known in this town.
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The best director is the one you don’t see.
BILLY WILDER -
Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.
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An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house.
BILLY WILDER